This disclosure relates to determining demographics of a program audience.
Advertisers often set exposure goals for advertising campaigns for advertising content, e.g., television ads, and devise strategies to achieve these goals, e.g., when to air the advertising campaign content. Accordingly, advertisers are very interested in knowing the demographic composition of program audiences, e.g., the percentage of male and female viewers for a given program, the age distributions of the male and female viewers, and the like.
The number of viewers of a television program can be determined in a variety of ways. For example, viewing device logs, such as set top box logs that include channel tune records, can be analyzed to determine the number of set top box devices tuned to particular television programs at particular times. Additionally, some device logs also include demographic segment information, e.g., data that describe demographic segments of a household audience. Alternatively, some households may be categorized to one or more segment clusters (e.g., Equifax demographic interest clusters or Nielsen PRIZM clusters) that describe the segments of the viewers. Typically the segment data are generated by a process that is different from the process that is used to generate ratings data for television programs, i.e., the segment data are determined independently from the ratings data. Panels or surveys can also be used to estimate the number of viewers by demographic groups.
However, it is sometimes impractical to sample enough households to determine the audience composition for every particular television program. Accordingly, while some ratings information may be available for particular television programs, information describing the audience demographics of the programs may not be available.